A “Partnership App” For Holacracy®-Powered Companies
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In a typical top-down management structure, the power to hire and fire employees is generally in the hands of managers. With Holacracy at play, the game is entirely different: with the decentralization of authority, the separation of people and role, and the dynamic evolution of those roles, we end up with a situation that looks more like free agents going about their work with no central planning. There might not even be a single person who knows about everything you do. This then begs the question: who can decide how and when to hire or fire?
Holacracy doesn’t answer that question; it simply gives you a framework and processes for your company to figure it out. In other words, if Holacracy is an “operating system” for organizations, the “hire-and-fire” function is an “app” that needs to be added separately.
When we consult with clients to support their Holacracy adoption, the hire-and-fire question comes up early. At first, we often recommend that they keep doing whatever they’ve been doing up till now, and let tensions drive the change. However, as organizations mature in their practice of Holacracy, the limitations of their old systems become more apparent. It’s like running old software on a brand new computer — even if it works, it’s clearly not harnessing the full potential of the new environment.
The “3-Tier Partnership App”
We’ve certainly been feeling this tension at HolacracyOne for a while, as we’ve long outgrown our prior processes for hiring, firing, and determining partner compensation. Last week, HolacracyOne’s board adopted a new policy that changes the structure of our partnership. Today, we’re making this new “3-Tier Partnership App” available to anyone interested in checking it out. You can find it on our website.
In this video, Brian Robertson — designer of the app — describes the 3-Tier Partnership App. Here are the main points:
The app basically answers the question: “How can we account for the difference between partners deeply committed to the organization, and those for whom the commitment is lesser and more temporary?”
- This app separates “partnership commitment” from financial compensation.
- It defines three tiers of partners: Standard Partner, Tenured Partner, and Core Partner. Each tier requires a higher level of commitment to the organization, and in return offers a higher level of commitment from the organization.
- It was designed for a relatively small organization.
The release of this first “Holacracy App” is an exciting milestone. Although this app is NOT part of Holacracy® itself, it reveals one of Holacracy’s coolest features — it acts as a platform from which entrepreneurs can easily experiment with new ways to address business issues. Furthermore, the tangible nature of Holacracy’s governance records make it possible to share these new approaches. If there were a “Holacracy® App Store”, today’s Partnership App would be the first on the shelf (note to self: that’s actually an interesting idea…)
This post was originally published on October 30, 2013 at http://holacracy.org/blog/a-partnership-app-for-holacracy-powered-companies
